Savant Short Review:

Wayne's World, Wayne's World 2

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

All in all, there haven't been very many good or even memorable movies made from skits directly transplanted
from Saturday Night Live, even though a pretty high number of alumni have gone on to film careers,
even stellar ones. The Wayne's World running skit wouldn't have seemed a likely springboard
for a feature, but smart packaging and producing (mainly retaining Mike Myers not only as onscreen
talent, but writer as well) resulted in a pair of superior comedies.

Aurora Illinois wannabe misfits Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana
Carvey) run a ragtag cable access show from the Campbell family basement. Fueled solely
with their own demented suburban-loser wit, the show is a local success until promoter Benjamin
Oliver (Rob Lowe) snags it as a marketing vehicle for a proprietor of arcade halls, Noah Vanderhoff
(Brian Doyle-Murray). Ben also tries to co-opt Mike's hot new girlfriend Cassandra (Tia Carrere), a
rock'n roller from Hong Kong. Kicked off his own show for dissing the sponsor, Wayne's only hope of
keeping Benjamin from grabbing his girl is to interest legit record producer Frankie Sharp (Frank
DiLeo) in her career.

Wayne's World succeeds because it comes at its subject from all sides, nailing its comedy targets
square on and not losing an essential sense of sweetness. Myers and Carvey understand their
characters well and keep them consistent. Wayne and Garth are well-intentioned suburban guys who
didn't make it in school and are trying to have lives beyond their dead end fast-food jobs. They're
too ambitious to be losers, but their dreams are all based on infantile obsessions with rock musicians
like Alice Cooper, who makes a nice personal appearance. Garth suffers more obviously from a case of
ingrown self-esteem, but Wayne too hides his personal sense of worthlessness behind an
energetic flood of affectations and buzz-phrases. Typically, they consistently react to humiliating
circumstances with cheerful grins and poses meant to deflect the pain ... the key to their place
in the universe is their abject 'we're not worthy' abasement before any celebrity who crosses their
path. In short, they're neither perfect nor cruel, and come off as completely loveable.

Director Penelope Spheeris has done a creditble job keeping up the spirit of the piece, moving to comedy features after a career mostly in rock-oriented docus. Retaining the spirit of the original is what has happened best here, along with the constant flood of extraneous gags, like silly dream sequences, product-placement satire, and Wayne and Garth addressing the camera directly.

It's the basic truth of the character setup that persists ... Garth and Wayne remind us not only of amusing
friends in school, but ourselves. Who hasn't driven in a car, singing like an idiot to your favorite
song, but feeling like a million dollars 'cause you're with friends and having a great time?

Some inspired casting helps considerably. Tia Carrere is a forthright and uncomplicated love interest.
Rob Lowe's particularly slimy villain plays off his real-life bad boy image, more than anything particularly
evil he does in the film. Chris Farley does a nice bit as an exposition-loaded security
guard. Faces like Ione Skye, Donna Dixon, and Meat Loaf pop up, and Robert Patrick provides a nice
sting as a motorcycle cop, in a deft reference to Terminator 2.

A year later in their saga, Wayne and Garth are now living in loft space instead
of at home with their parents, but their cable show is still a local anomaly, and Wayne's girlfriend
Cassandra is now being courted by an even shadier promoter, Bobby (Christopher Walken). Wayne is
contacted in his dreams by Jim Morrison (Michael A. Nickles) who tells him to promote a big rock
festival in Aurora, with huge name acts like Aerosmith. Following Morrison's cryptic instructions,
Wayne and Garth take a trip to England to collect legendary roadie Del Preston (Ralph Brown), who
also has been receiving telepathic messages from the late lead singer of the Doors. They hold a fund
raiser at a Communist-themed nightclub, but all looks grim as Wayne alienates both Cassandra and
Garth (who's seduced by hot-chick Honey Horneé (Kim Basinger) to kill her husband), and is afraid
nobody will buy a ticket to their self-styled "WayneStock".

With the characters established and the basic 'world' already delineated, one would expect Wayne's
World 2 to just be more of the same, but some
real thought was actually put into their second outing. The plot is more complicated this time around,
but keeps the focus on the two central personalities, putting Myers through some interesting paces with
a Twin Peaks-like hallucination (a half-naked Indian leads the sleeping Myers to see Jim
Morrison), and turning sexpot Kim Basinger loose on the utterly defenseless Garth. The satire
of commercial Rock 'n Roll is even more accurate, with our heroes confronted by moronic fans, and
saddled with a burned-out 'rock legend' who has a great superstar scrapbook but tends toward senility.
Christopher Walken's character is nicely underplayed, the gags come faster and mostly as fresh.
Even when the material is obvious (the Village People routine) the enthusiasm makes it enjoyable. The
film even drags Charlton Heston in for a particularly hilarious gag. Only at the very end did the fun
sag a bit, when the movie parodies of The Graduate and Thelma & Louise fail to build
into anything. But who's perfect?

Although Savant has little use for the infantile poo-poo humor level of most of Myers' Austin
Powers, he finds both Wayne's World movies the equivalent of Bob Hope or Red Skelton vehicles.
This was one favorite of my son's that I didn't have to pretend to like.

Paramount Home Video's DVDs of Wayne's World and Wayne's World 2 are technically
topnotch, with bright pictures and punchy audio. The audio commentaries are okay, but not standouts.
I sampled Stephen Surjik's track on the sequel in half a dozen places, and everything he had to say
was pretty predictable, like 'Mike really wanted the Kung-Fu parody', or 'Chuck Heston was a nice guy.'
The best gag on the disk is the clever menu setup, which mimics
a cable channel guide. A bunch of provocative titles like Fun with Fire slip out of our reach,
but we are allowed to select cable programs like The Brady Bunch, an exercise program, or an
Elvis movie, all
available or soon to be available from Paramount home video, naturally. Actual little clips pop up when
we make our choice ... very cute. Paramount seems to have acquired all or part of the Republic library,
as can be seen by a quick snippet of a Nyoka serial with a jungle girl menaced by a giant
crawfish! (Yes, those are the kinds of associations Savant makes!).

So to help keep it all straight, Wayne's World = Alice Cooper. Wayne's World 2 = Aerosmith.